Disney on Diversity
By Erykah Cameron
Disney as a media company has been criticised for some time in terms of their lack of diversity and inclusivity in both their employment behind the scenes, and in the content that they publish.
From having no non-white directors until 2015, to eluding to but never explicitly saying, a character is anything but straight and cisgender and giving almost no representation to anyone in the LGBTQ+ community.
However, in the last few years, they have recognised this as one of their shortcomings, and have committed to changing that. Disney states that in 2019, nearly 2,000 of their employees participated in LGBTQ+ Pride events across the US and Europe. As well as this, they published data in 2019 that said of their US workforce, 72% were women and/or people of colour.
Looking back to when these changes really began to take off, 2016 was a turning point for Disney in regards to race inclusivity in their content.
This saw the releases of Queen of Katwe and Moana, which both featured main characters who were female, women of colour, and led stories in which neither of them have a particular love interest who swoops in to save them, as is often seen in more traditional Disney films with the role of the princess and her prince charming.
This was fairly unheard of at the time for Disney as most of their female characters had a man come to save the day, with the exception of the 2012 film Brave in which Merida, the main character, doesn’t want to marry. As well as Queen of Katwe’s unique lead character, it was directed by an Indian-American woman, Mira Nair, which was significant for Disney as before this point, from 2007-2016, Walt Disney Studios only had five films directed by females (all of whom were white), despite distributing over 100 films during this time period.
From 2016 onwards, lots more diversity was seen behind the scenes, demonstrated with Taika Waititi directing Thor: Ragnarok in 2017, and said to be planning the next Thor film in association with Marvel and Disney too. In this next film, Thor: Love and Thunder, due to be released at some point in 2022, it is rumoured that we’ll see some representation of LGBTQ+ characters for the first time, with Valkyrie potentially being portrayed as bisexual as she is in the comics.
Added to this, in March 2020, Marvel President Kevin Feige confirmed that Marvel Studios (owned by Disney) were planning to introduce the first transgender superhero, setting the bar for other media organisations to follow in their footsteps.
Despite this progress in the film sector and their employment diversity, it’s important to note that since launching their streaming service Disney+ at the end of 2019, there has again been some controversy around the lack of LGBTQ+ representation in their original TV shows, and the absence of some of them on the service completely, both in the UK and the US.
Disney did address this in relation to the show Love, Victor by explaining that it wasn't considered ‘family-friendly’ so it was added to Hulu, also owned by Disney, instead. However, after evaluating this choice, the decision to add the series to Disney+ was made. Producers have addressed the representation in the show and have committed to improving it for season two by having more diverse LGBTQ+ representation and less censorship around sex and sexual orientation.
Love, Victor also represents members of the Latino community as well as those in the LGBTQ+ community, which is a big step as the Latino community is known to be heavily underrepresented and/or misrepresented, with ‘fewer Latino lead actors in the entertainment industry today, than there were seventy years ago’, and the harmful stereotyping that occurs with the roles they are cast.
Hopefully, this precedent that Disney has set by identifying their weaknesses and promising to change them will influence other media companies in a similar situation to do the same, but for now we’ll just have to wait and see.